Hey, remember that time when Carbon markets collapsed in Europe?

Before the US adopts the silly cap-and-trade "market" approach to curbing carbon emissions, perhaps we should see what the recession has done to the European carbon market. The EU has spent a lot of money rediscovering the laws of supply and demand in this recession. Instead of making carbon emissions a scarcity, the economic collapse has created a glut of indulgences... All of which has set off what Julian Glover calls the "Great Pollution Fire Sale". He blames the EU for being too generous in its allocation of carbon credits, but the allocation was calculated during economic growth. The EU wanted to make sure that the cap-and-trade system didn't interfere with the economy, and so made sure that the energy producers didn't get disincentivized enough to create artifical energy shortages that would have stalled growth.

And then remember that other time a few days later the Obama administration announced a Cap and Trade system?

President Barack Obama will propose raising new revenue through a greenhouse gas cap and emissions trading scheme when he unveils his first budget on Thursday, US media reported. The budget he will present assumes an emissions trading system will generate revenue by 2012, the Washington Post reported. Fifteen billion dollars of the money generated would be directed to clean-energy projects, the Post said, citing sources familiar with the document.

These tools have been resentfully stewing for the last eight years, dreaming of the time when they'd get to correct all of the Bush administration's oh-so-ideological missteps. Their understanding of history begins in 2001. Their understanding of sophistication is "whatever's popular in Europe." And now that they're in power, the fact that they were always a little bit pathetic and silly about the whole thing is beside the point.

Seriously: how inadequate is your understanding of political economy when Vladamir Putin has to explain the dangers of statist centralization to you?